This past March, I attended #EdCampOmaha. I went to a session led by my friend @MattBGomez. Matt is an awesome Kindergarten teacher and I respect and trust his advice. I’ve always wanted to have a classroom Twitter account, but our discussion that day, at #EdCampOmaha cinched it for me.
My biggest worry about having a classroom Twitter account is the tweets I really didn’t want my students to see. Twitter now has promoted tweets and you never really know what they will post. Matt shared that he favorites the tweets he wanted his students to see. Problem solved! So I set up our account, @Room113SMM
Hello, World!
— Mrs. Gilman’s Class (@Room113SMM) March 25, 2013
Maybe I should back up a bit. Why did I want a classroom Twitter account? One of the reasons is to communicate what is happening in the classroom. If we had a celebration, I wanted to tell the world, not just jump up on a chair in my room. If we had a new vocabulary game, I wanted a quick way to share it out. If we had a question or a thought to share, I wanted to acknowledge the importance of that idea by sharing it out.
So far, the account has been a big hit! My favorite tweeting activity has been summarizing the weekly Mass homily. So far, they have done a great job on sharing, in 140 characters what the homily was about.
At Mass today, Fr. reminded us to put on Christ and help someone in need. We sang “Go Make a Difference!”
— Mrs. Gilman’s Class (@Room113SMM) September 11, 2013
We are also tweeting using our own hashtag. I read On a Beam of Light: A Story of Albert Einstein during the first week of school. I want to encourage my students to always ask questions and to continue to wonder about our world. So we wrote ‘paper tweets’ using the hashtag #iWonderSMM I decided to add the initials of our school to our new hashtags. I discovered the importance of doing this after having them write ‘paper tweets’ during the first day on what they want to learn this year in 3rd grade. If I had used the hashtag, #iLearn instead of #iLearnSMM, students or parents doing a hashtag search would get an eye full.
Another point in my classroom Twitter account is that I am doing the typing. But we are composing the tweets together. 3rd graders aren’t the best at typing and I want this activity to be quick. I do want to honor the TOS from Twitter. I share, with my class, that students younger than 13 shouldn’t be on Social Media.
I think the classroom we have tweeted the most is our friends in Canada, Mr. Chidiac’s Grade 2 Golden Stars. We had an opportunity for a real life global difference in spelling. It took my students a few minutes to notice how Canadians spell a common word differently.
This past Friday, we had a very real example of the importance of editing. We read a Tweet from Mr. Chidiac’s class about their new classroom pet. We wanted to tweet back our excitement and also that we knew what their new pet was. Here is the tweet.
Can you find the mistake?
There are so many classrooms on Twitter! It seems to be the ‘in’ thing. I decided to limit who we follow to Catholic classrooms. I also made a Twitter list with Catholic classrooms on Twitter. So far we have 9 members. If you know of any Catholic classrooms on Twitter. Please let me know.
Privacy is very important to our school and parents. I only tweet using student numbers, if we want to share a student quote. I also take pictures of objects, not students. Here is a picture of our flyswatters used for our Flyswatter Vocabulary game we play for vocabulary review. Don’t worry, they have never been used on real flies.
I hope you will consider opening a Twitter account for your classroom. It’s been a great experience so far.
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